Two Bowls of Milk
Page 3
When you lie dead in December
in a white bed, you will be no
angel rising, only a slow
sublimation: snow becoming
vapour without ever being
water. Now I’m winter’s daughter.
LES BEAUX JOURS (1937)
Here a glimpse of soaring blue: her scarf,
flicker of summer maples against river.
This Madeleine you’ve married, will she
make you remember who you were
before cold weather? With grace her sun-
burned neck bends to the view you paint
her into. This morning she laid aside
her brush to make your lunch
and has not picked it up again.
(Before your death she’ll speak
of sacrifice as though it were a pool,
blood-warm, and I will read her archived
words, furious in winter.) Whose
choice was this? Though you
believed her praising eye alone
kept your canvases alive, you killed
the part of her that could have lit you.
Love bends me in more resistant shapes;
my neck cracks like ice. I would not give you
a shred of blue, my own too few and far.
LE FAR-WEST (1955)
A few acres of snow. In a Montréal
December I come upon your few feet
of west, a tawny field grazed on
by some animals. They might be
antelope and this some view of
Africa – or cows and Idaho? What
cowboy hat do you imagine
my umbrella is? You have not gone
far enough, your English Bay a mouth
drawn shut, its trees cowering
under an enormous Québec
sky I cannot write, my words
small glimpses between
this branch of fir and that. How west
must have threatened to open
you. My pages nearly white
these days, I’m shutting up.
That “I” I write no longer me
but you, alone in the midst of what
I call nothing and you home.
L’ORPHELINE (1956)
Whatever makes you and I believe
ourselves tout seul has got her too,
her painted face the unrepentant
grey of moon. I know lead
lines her eyes, each chamber
of her heart. Her eyelashes rubbed out:
this world the same no matter what.
I cried till I had no water left. All was
ice. Those rectangles, a distant
steeple: what home crumbled into
when I left. Parents might be waiting
at a kitchen table for her safe return,
very much alive, as mine are, as yours
were when you turned them into
monuments apart. You hardly left
the city of your birth, never arrived.
Though I made it holy in my mind,
that place I left was never mine.
LE CHAMP DE TRÉFLES (1971)
Where did summer come from,
the field awash in clover? A woman
I should know is placed just so, as all
your women are, elegant and self-
contained, extending in her hand
wildflowers a blue I thought extinct.
Her colours layered upon your old
palette over grey and black make
your eyes tear up. Her lips rise into
a smile you had not foreseen. Can you
reach to meet her hand? All of this
is yours. You scratch your name, small
near the edge of her white dress,
then trade this canvas for another,
blank. If I turn from you and take her
offered luck, will this sky break?
LA FLORIDE (1965)
This couple used by sun then left
behind could be your parents,
old: his face driftwood whittled
too long, hers a blob of cocoa butter.
That place of snow and mapled
beans, kitchen with its crucifix,
might not be real from here. The boy
a sheaf of wheat behind them,
midday hot on the back of his head,
turned away. Why is he here?
He’s looking at that scatter of small
figures far down the sand.
He could go there. But you didn’t,
you became that downcast
man who casts no shadow under
unrelenting sun. I could have turned
into her, hat wide-brimmed to keep
my face from melting. Instead I’m
so distant I might be a grain of sand
or the water my feet enter.
1910 REMEMBERED (1962)
You remember yourself: boy, aged
six, striped into a sailor suit alone
between two figures: la mère, le père.
You have not changed, painting
that cloud a stone above your head,
approach of hope as a woman
under her white parasol. She might
save you, if the sky doesn’t fall before
her steps draw near. Listen: I’ve feared
earthquakes, falling asteroids, being
alone. Let your fingers span that
distance to the crenellated edges
of your mother’s parasol. We’re
loved. Your wife sitting in the garden
as you paint, my love calling me
in his magic accent. Our mothers
never leave us. Toward that promise
on your flat horizon I’ve walked
under overcast sky, then out. Sun
bathes me, forgives my doubt.
DEUX PERSONNAGES DANS LA NUIT (V. 1989)
This is only part of it: red smear
of her lips at the left, his at the right.
Which is longer, winter
or the distance between them?
How little they like each other, how
alike they look. Soon you will
leave us with this, no spare room
in the wide frame for your wife’s
body close through twenty thousand
nights. I wait with her downstairs
in the kitchen where she taught
children how to paint. We clink
our glasses of red wine, liquid jewels
lighting the white cloth. In that field,
you’re still waiting for the train.
Why did we believe we needed
tickets? Why didn’t you walk? Here,
a fire melts snow from my socks.
LES BEAUX JOURS, REPRISE
Tu me manques to my English
mind means “you are missing
from me.” But I don’t miss you
and am whole as I cross this white
plain that is the river. Water
holds me up. This was blue
just months ago, rippled, and will
soon return to ripples to return
to sea. You were dead when I
first saw your painted faces
taking numbness as their due.
They still loom up, open
their mouths, too weak to break
through ice. I do not bend
to crack open breath-holes
I could fall into. Home is my feet
laying a path I’ll follow back.
Sun streams through a buoyant
sky to dazzle snow. My shadow
flits, so quick it can’t be fixed.
INSIDE A TENT OF SKIN
poems in the National Gallery of Canada
FLAP ANATOMY
The Ingenious Machine of Nature: Four Centuries of Art and Anatomy, National Gallery of Canada, Autumn 1996.
Nothing is unspl
it.
In the cabinet of flap anatomies,
babies burst through women’s paper
flesh full-term, germinated
through some random crash of cells.
Framed upon the wall, fathers frolic
in various degrees of nude
and skeleton and écorché, muscle
stripped like bacon from their thighs.
My jutting pelvic bones
injure my lover, scare children
from my lap – I might be that dissected
girl in pen and ink, perused
by a dark-suited man who smells
of hot secretions. He examines each
of her named parts, then my narrow waist.
Does he imagine the soft gap
that lies inside? I must be oblivious to it, I am
a brain aloft within a skull. I have seen
skunks torn to a stink of crimson,
white and black; Frère Andrè’s heart
in glass; but not the inside
of my body. Opened like that woman
a hyena’s jaw tore into while she watched
or the yellow-fever victim
who vomited his stomach out,
could I claim those ruddy clots
and pulses as mine, as me?
Could I look upon my insides, out?
STILL LIFE WITH BRAID
Female Dissected Body, Seen From the Back, Gérard de Lairesse, 1685. Engraving with etching.
I loved her when we washed our hands
in matching sinks at school. She feared the cubicles
where a raincoat with a man in it might stand
on a toilet’s rim awaiting us, pocket knife
tight in his fist. Once her desk waited
all day for her. She was not dead, the teacher
reassured, just camping with her family. I doused
my tears in icy water, wished for her braids.
She did not come. My letter slot released
a drawing of an iris, pencilled throat open, bulb
engorged beneath. Veins so intricately etched
they stung the purple in my wrists. No hand but hers
had done it. Then I forgot. Time passed
until I visited a gallery and ticking stopped
before her adult portrait: wrists resplendent, raw
in bracelets of taut rope. A posture
she had practised during recess to prepare.
Peeled to reveal her braided spine, skin draped
her waist, was pinned aside like coy sleeves fitted
to her upper arms. The alphabet named her
crucial points but not that curl she’d tucked
behind her ear at eight. Her face averted, ashamed
at believing its body worth this spectacle of death.
Why did I not tell her she was more than this? I am
no more myself: bones pitched inside a tent of skin;
fear; one bound hand and the other binding.
OUT/CAST
September 1975, Colette Whiten, 1975. Plaster, burlap, wood, rope, fibreglass, metal, and paint.
Flesh was here: eyes shut under
sticky white, whorl of ear within
which plaster hardened, muting
all sound. All that remains
is the space a woman once took.
What if these sarcophagal hinges
swung shut, enclosing my whole
body? A ship inside a bottle, but
who outside could pull the string
to lift its sails? Once, on a Gulf
island, my friend pressed wet sheets
of plaster against my face until
my face was there without me.
Later she painted rose and yellow
over that hard white and on her
cabin wall I didn’t recognize
myself. The air around her naked
body as she showered in the forest
glistened. Two profiles engaged
with each other make a curving vase
between them. One face that shuts
itself into a box has made a box.
It was so dark that I was blind
to shapes my face engraved inside.
DOG-WOMAN
Dog-Woman, Peggy Ekagina, c. 1974. Greyish-green stone.
Who’s to say I’m not
that dog, that small
woman low to ground
and wrought of greenish
stone, packed inside
the flaccid palm of who
I think I am. Snow
and blue ice, song
of a woman cutting
excess from a rock
she found. She kept it
warm a long time in her
fist, the idea of dog-
woman hardening
to bone, barking hot.
It took her a week.
Ice cracked, her kids
cried for meat. Now
dog-woman lives
in a glass case in
a basement where a girl’s
paid to wear a suit
and watch that no one
steals her. I come
on Fridays. That girl and I
have nearly melted
the glass with our breath
waiting for animal speech.
In silence, dog-woman’s
replete, unleashed.
WAITING ROOM
The Hotel Eden, Joseph Cornell, 1945. Assemblage with music box.
Mornings, a green parrot pronounces children’s names in French. This room is white and past the glass a clutch of palm trees waves hello, goodbye. Then there’s the sea. I watch it froth. I push that yellow ball across the floor beneath my foot. It puts a good hurt somewhere in my throat. I’ve read the body’s made of bits that link in unexpected ways and this is one: when I say the parrot’s name he tugs a string to start the music box. Stars twinkle twinkle as song pricks a metal fingertip. There is no blood. My mother sang that, twinkle, very far away. She’s even farther now and still I find her voice inside my mouth as I address the box I painted shut. It’s not too late to fill it with an infant, little protuberance from my gut. But I have my bird and chair and music, water always moving out. I have the song my mother passed along and cannot give it, ever, up.
SIX NUDES OF NEIL
Neil Weston, 1925, Edward Weston. Photographs.
You frame many parts of him.
Anonymous buttocks, torso
the delicate curvature
of treble clef, he’s become
another thing entirely.
Fresh from his mother, he was
all light and stirring; unlike
your vegetables he would not
lie still until the right shadows fell.
Now he lets you prop him
in a doorway. For the last
picture you open the shutter
to let in his face you’ve placed
in profile. What part of you
made him look like that?
His cheek is desert. It will outlast
all the stones you’ve photographed.
It’s hot, the door is blocked, your
dark clothes hurt you, you have
never loved anyone enough.
GARDEN COURT
In childhood I dreamt I would be in such a still place.
These plants were never pulled from actual
earth, they were always here under pebbled light.
Their leaves are green and paler green, and flowers
bloom an antiseptic pink in rows. Painted,
this would be more than real. Itself, it’s less,
a simulation copied from no thing. And I?
What air is here is thin, held under a bell jar.
In the dream, goldfish the colour of blossoms
were under a bridge under a sky, it was a good place.